1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to data analysis methodologies and, more specifically, to systems and methods for determining the location of emitters having well-behaved timing features.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Emitter identification and geolocation algorithms provide the capability to discriminate between individual emitters and determine their locations. In general, a given emitter can be identified and distinguished from other emitters according to one or more characteristics of an emitted signal. Various geolocation algorithms are known, using a variety of different signal characteristics and combinations of signal characteristic to locate and identify emitters.
One method for locating an emitter includes analyzing the arrival time of the emissions from the emitter at a receiver. Locating the emitter from time of arrival calculations is complicated by the large number of unknown parameters associated with the task. The emitter's location is, of course, unknown in three dimensions. The period of the emitter's base clock is unknown. In addition, the clock multiples driving the timing features are unknown as well. So we see that for N observations/measurements of timing features, there are at least N+4 unknowns. Furthermore, there are multiple candidate solutions that may fit the observed data fairly well. Discriminating among the various candidates can be difficult.